It was foggy out this morning, very early, just before eight, before the sun had risen. It was also that deeply beautiful shade of violet blue that I love so much.

When I was a child, I loved to roam the fields and forests on foggy mornings. Sometimes I was afoot, and other times I was on horseback. Each mode of travel held its own charms.

On horseback, in the fields, the scent of horse overrode the scent of human, and I could hear deer moving about the shorn cornfields, but never could I see them in the thick fog, so I soon turned my horse back into her pasture and struck out alone.

Afoot, I could disappear into the fog, knowing the paths and trails with my eyes closed, so familiar and dear were they to me. I loved the feel and smell of the damp earth, trees and rocks. The thrill of adventure when I left the fields, angling into the woods, down its slope, across rain-freshened creeks, then across the wide bottom of the big field, past an old settlers grave, down yet another, steeper wooded slope to a cool and clear running spring, where I would drink my fill straight from the source as it left the ground.

It was like existing in another world, enfolded in those magical pre-dawn mists and enshrouded in the most perfect holy color of sacred violet blue. Rooted in earth, yet free as the sky, I was an entirely different being then.

But I still remember that child, the one who danced with the wind, walked among the trees, carefree and daring. She lives still, but she knows her world is not the world I live in now, so she is restless, sad, hopeless and yet hopeful.

She is there in every long way home, that yearning ache to pull over and set out across a field, through the woods or wade in a creek.

She is there in a downpour, remembering a hiding place way up near the rafters amid the hay bales, listening to the thunderous rain on the barn roof.

She is there on starry nights, remembering lying in a field watching the moon and stars rise and set, dreaming of the wonders of the Universe and wishing on shooting stars.

She is there in the smell of woodsmoke, recalling days of helping to cut and split wood and winter evenings by the fire with hot tea.

She is there in the snow, remembering the pristine and holy silence of a snowy Winter’s night when first I heard the sound of falling snow.

She is there in the glorious sweep of a verdant field rising up to meet an impossibly blue sky and cottony clouds I dreamed on.

She is there in the falling leaves, the harvested fields, the scent of hay and horse and green corn.

She is there in ever woodland wildflower, the Dutchman’s Breeches, the Jack In The Pulpits, the Violets of yellow.

She is there in every Shagbark Hickory, every Beech and Oak, every Weeping Willow, and the long bank of Maples that blazed fiery red every Autumn.

She is there in every creek, bringing home stones and frogs, mats woven from cattail leaves and jars of tadpoles.

She is there in long, blazing sunsets, quiet nights of crickets and the far off calls of an owl.

She weeps for what was lost, bereft, empty, aching and mourning for the only home she ever loved.

Oh my darling inner child, my wild darling, who broke rules and did impossible things. Who loved with her whole self those acres that raised her, that fed her body and her soul, that made her….her. My darling, I promise you, we’ll go home, someday.

Once, long ago, when I was but a child, I discovered a secret. A secret that only a child could discover, and it has stayed with me for forty-three years.

The secret?

That on a cold and still Winter’s midnight, in the depths of the silence that encompasses a snowfall, that the falling snow has a voice. A voice all its own; a voice so quiet, that it’s just the faintest of whispers, just a tiny breath of sound.

From the moment I discovered that sound, the very instant I heard it, snowfalls held a sacredness to them. To think of it now, conjures up images of silent fields dressed in white, cloaked in that deep violet blue of twilight that lends its own sacredness, listening to the holy choir sing its fragile, sacred snow song as it falls on and all around me.